AFGHANISTAN: Westchester Poet Pamela Hart Mentors Afghan Women Writers

We've all heard stories about how hard it is for girls and women in Afghanistan.

How hard it is to go to school. How hard it is to make their own choices and defy their families. How hard it is sometimes to even leave their houses.

But we rarely hear the stories in the women's own voices. For us in America, they're hidden behind face coverings and house walls, the victims of an oppressive society and the wars that never seem to end.

Now writers from around the United States are becoming mentors and teachers to Afghan women writers through a New York-based project that nurtures their efforts and gives them a platform to speak to the world. The women write in English and interact with their teachers by computer, sometimes walking hours to get access and in some cases risking their safety to get their writing out.

Inspired by the controversial book "Three Cups of Tea," Westchester poet Pamela Hart signed up to be a mentor for the Afghan Women's Writing Project last year. She served a rotation in November, giving her class weekly assignments with a jumping-off point such as a favorite place or a small moment in everyday activities.

She got back mostly poetry from the women, whom she knew only by first name to preserve their anonymity. One poem called "If I was not a woman" described the freedom and worth the author would have had if she were born a boy and her mother's suffering when she turned out to be a girl.

"That piece of it was an eye-opener, an awakening moment for me," said Hart, who lives in South Salem and is a fellow at the Purchase College Writer's Center and the writer in residence at the Katonah Museum.

In a series of articles by an anonymous writer in the project's online journal called "I Am for Sale," a woman describes how she escaped an arranged marriage and lives in fear of the uncle whose son she spurned.

"In my country, I am considered bad, and people blame me for standing against my family, failing to respect my elders, and rejecting a life serving the husband my uncle chose for me whom I didn't love," she wrote. "Only my pen tolerates my choices."

Other stories are about the war, about loving and supportive fathers or about girls realizing their dreams.

"The fact that they are writing in the midst of everything going on — and we don't know, it could be very ordinary — speaks to the importance of what writing means to someone," Hart said.

Masha Hamilton, a journalist and novelist who lives in Brooklyn, started the Afghan Women's Writing Project in 2008 with one class she taught herself. Her interest in Afghanistan began in 1999 when she saw a video of a woman named Zarmeena executed on a football field by the Taliban.

"I watched her execution and I felt a little bit voyeuristic ," Hamilton said. "And out of personal honor to her I felt I should find out as much as I could about her."

After her first class, she quickly realized the need for a more organized effort. In May 2009 the Afghan Women's Writing Project officially began with monthly rotating classes taught by volunteers. Donations have paid for laptops for the writers.

From the first class where Hamilton found the students through her contacts in Afghanistan, the classes grew by word of mouth. The project has been kept under the radar to protect the women but still a wide range of women have become involved, from a member of parliament to students, housewives, teachers and government workers.

"We want to show the complexity of what these women are experiencing," Hamilton said.

Many of the women keep their writing secret but some have been found out and have been targeted. The Writing Project coordinated an effort to get one of its writers political asylum in another country. Another writer, living in a very conservative province, got a "night letter," a common means of threatening women who step out of line.

"I think some of them are, in a certain way, really writing to save their lives," Hamilton said.

For Hart, who will teach next in November, the project felt like a space of hope for the Afghan writers.

"I felt like I was able to enlarge that space for a short amount of time," she said.